Feiffer remembered: Interviews and other items from the TCJ archives

As part of our homage to the mighty Jules Feiffer, who died of congestive heart failure on Jan. 17, 2025 at the age of 95, we thought we'd highlight a few articles and interview from our back pages, so to speak. Also, if you haven't seen it yet, you can read Michael Dean's excellent obituary of the man here.

First up is Feiffer's classic 1988 interview with Gary Groth, which originally ran in issue #124 of the Journal:

GROTH: Could you chart your evolution, visually? You started off, the early Sick, Sick, Sick stuff at least, very angular, no fluidity, and sans the spontaneous line you developed later.

FEIFFER: Oh, there wasn’t any [style]. I was struggling for style. Those drawings you found in that pile, some of them date back to those years, and almost all of them are more interesting than you’ll find in Sick, Sick, Sick, because as soon as I got to reproduction, I would stiffen up. I couldn’t handle a brush very well. I couldn’t handle a pen very well. I could handle a pencil well, but you couldn’t reproduce in pencil. Finally I stumbled on a technique of using wooden dowels and that gave me a dry line which I liked very much, which approximated I guess pencil. And I’d draw those in poster and black ink, diluted. And that gave me a line that I liked for a while. But it took forever to do, it was very slow going. In those years I was very influenced by William Steig and Osborn, and the closer I could get my work to look like them, the happier I would be. I must have been doing the weekly strip for, oh, I can’t think of how long, anywhere from three months to six months to maybe a year, before I hit on the drawing style I liked.

Feiffer returned to TCJ in 2014, speaking to Greg Hunter about the publication of his graphic novel, Kill My Mother:

Did drawing Kill My Mother force you to do anything as a cartoonist you hadn’t done before?

It was a complete revolution for me, in my way of thinking, in my way of approaching art and toying with it. I spent over forty years doing Village Voice strips, almost never doing backgrounds, because the characters were the prominent thing and the conversation was the prominent thing. I thought backgrounds would be distracting, and in addition, I didn’t know what anything looked like that wasn’t a human figure. I’ve never had an eye for the inanimate. And so I never drew cars or planes—all the things that boys generally love to do. They were totally foreign to me, alien to me. Buildings, bridges, all of that stuff. And noir, if you take a look at any of the movies—Double Indemnity [1944], Maltese Falcon [1941], any of them—they’re full of atmosphere. And atmosphere is backgrounds, reflected light, shading. All that stuff that I had perfectly no experience in drawing or in thinking about. So I had to completely rethink my entire approach to drawing, at the age of eighty.

We also have Feiffer's introduction and afterword from his -- dare I say essential -- book, The Great Comic Book Heroes: 

In drawing style, both in figure and costume, Superman was a simplified parody of Flash Gordon. But if Alex Raymond was the Dior for Superman, Joe Shuster set the fashion from then on. Everybody else’s super-costumes were copies from his shop. Shuster represented the best of old-style comic book drawing. His work was direct, unprettied — crude and vigorous; as easy to read as a diagram. No creamy lines, no glossy illustrative effects, no touch of that bloodless prefabrication that passes for professionalism these days. Slickness, thank God, was beyond his means. He could not draw well, but he drew single-mindedly — no one could ghost that style. It was the man. When assistants began “improving” the appearance of the strip it promptly went downhill. It looked as though it were being drawn in a bank.

Feiffer also took part in a 1988 panel satire and editorial cartooning that included Chuck Freund, Brad Holland, David Levine and Peter Steiner, the transcription of which originally ran in issue #119 of the Journal:

FEIFFER: I am now old enough to know that experience is often meaningless. All it teaches you is what you were determined to know when you were 25 anyhow. You just re-focus it in different ways over the years. I think when you are young the advantage is that you should come in with a passion that may dissipate over the years, and if you don’t have that passion when you’re in your 20s or early 30s, it seems to me you have no business in the business, because it’s not going to get stronger, and if you don’t start out having it strong virtually to the point of obsession in the first place, then you’re not well prepared for the long run. That passion makes up for a lot of what you call a lack of background. One of the things that has always bothered me about this society is the credence we give “experts” and “qualified sources.” If Henry Kissinger is an example of such, I think we don’t know the kind of trouble we’re in. Or for that matter, Charles Krauthammer.

Finally, we offer a link to J. Caleb Mozzocco's 2018 review of Feiffer's The Ghost Script: 

His decades as a cartoonist have obviously made him into a formidable character designer, and each and every character has a unique and strikingly look--if this were a film, its cast would be comprised entirely of character actors--and they all radiate explosive and subtle emotions through the nervous jumble of lines that each is composed of. And they all hold their form,

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